750 DISCUSSION ON WHEAT: 
1. On the General Economic Position of Wheat Growing and the Special 
Considerations Affecting the North-West of Canada. A Résumé 
by Major P. G. Cratciz, C.B. 
In the address which opened the deliberations of the Sub-Section of 
Agriculture (printed in full in the Transactions of the Association), the 
Chairman invited attention to the paramount influence exerted on problems 
of this type by the varying growth of population and the relative degrees 
in which from time to time different regions of the earth contributed to the 
production of wheat. E 
A review of the available statistics made it plain that, although some 
effort had been made to feed the largely augmenting populations of Western 
Europe by securing an increased yield from the acreage previously employed, 
it was mainly from the surplus of certain still exporting States of Eastern 
Europe, and from the ample and more lately peopled areas of North and South 
America, and in a minor degree Australia, that the inevitable deficit of 
bread corn in this quarter of the earth’s surface had to be supplied. Although 
it was opportune and appropriate to enter at this Winnipeg meeting on a 
careful examination of the local features attending the rapid acceleration 
of wheat-growing in the North-West, sound conclusions respecting the relative 
extent of the future supply to be drawn from any single geographical area 
involved an examination of world-wide problems. 
The conclusions of the statistician and economist were required, as well 
as the advice of the scientific investigator and experimentalist, before an 
answer could be given to the question whether, how far, and at what rate, 
with profit to himself and with benefit to the bread consumer across the 
ocean, the Canadian agriculturist—in the face of the conditions now 
existing or likely to prevail—could push the further extension of the well- 
nigh eight million acres of wheat land which the Dominion claimed to show 
in 1909. ¢ 
By way of clearing the ground for this local discussion, reference was 
made to the effect of more recent statistics in dissipating the alarm which 
had been raised in 1898 by Sir William Crookes--largely on the authority 
of earlier data supplied by an American statistician—that the wheat-pro- 
ducing soil of the world, as a whole, was becoming unequal to the strain put 
upon it by the multiplication of bread-eaters; and that a wheat famine 
could only be averted by materially raising the world’s average of wheat 
yield per acre on the surface at present deyoted to that cereal by the 
beneficial magic of the chemist in making available a fertilising supply of 
nitrogen sufficient to raise that average nearly 50 per cent. 
As a fact, much greater progress had been made in extending the wheat- 
fields of the globe in various directions from 1897 onwards than in the years 
between that date and 1884. Even supposing it were true that the growth 
of men had outstripped the growth of wheat areas between 1884 and 1897 
the recorded extension of the world’s wheat-fields in the next decade was 
well over that of population. 
The remarkable period of stagnation, which left the areas under wheat 
in the United States in 1893-97 no higher than the 35,500,000 acres at which 
they stood in 1878-82—a phenomenon which so largely affected the 
pessimistic conclusions of 1898—had given way to renewed advance even in 
that region, and to more remarkable developments elsewhere. An upward 
bound of the curve of progress could be traced, not only in new but in some 
old-world exporting countries. Far too little attention had been given to 
the statistics which showed how, even in European Russia—as well as in 
Caucasian and Asiatic provinces of that Hmpire—wheat growing had 
increased, while the new factors of Argentina and Canada were playing a 
part far more potent and significant as to their future possibilities than was 
credited to them ten years ago. 
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